God's love of the Church—OT and NT
Commenting on Hosea 11 the Scots commentator George A
Smith said this. "Passing by all the empires of earth, the Almighty
chose for Himself this people that was no people, this tribe that was
the slave of Egypt. And the choice was one of love only: ‘When Israel
was young I came to love him, and out of Egypt I called My son.’ It was
the adoption of a little slave boy, adoption by the heart; and the
fatherly figure continues, ‘I taught Ephraim to walk, taking him upon
Mine arms.’ It is just the same charm, seen from another point of view,
when Hosea hears God say that He had ‘found Israel like grapes in the
wilderness, like the firstfruits of an early fig tree I saw your
fathers.’ "
This is how the Jewish Publication Society Version renders Hosea 11:1,
I fell in love with Israel
When he was still a child;
And I have called [him] My son
Ever since Egypt.
I fell in love with Israel
When he was still a child;
And I have called [him] My son
Ever since Egypt.
Theodore Laetsch renders it, "When Israel was young, then I began to
love him, and from Egypt I called My Son." And G. Adam Smith points out
that the verb stresses the point or moment at which something happens
and renders it, in line with the previous two, "I came to love" Israel.
The picture generated by the words in the text is clear. One day God was
looking around at the nations he had created and his eye passed over
powerful Assyria, sword in hand and with its lean and rippling muscles.
Then he looked long at gorgeous Egypt with its wealth, culture and
centuries of mystery before he caught sight of a little slave child.
Helpless, bewildered and, to God, a lovely little boy. Here was a child
with no power, no national history and no land to call his own and God’s
heart went out to him at that time and he came to love him and adopted
him as his son.
As the infant grew God taught him to walk (11:3). Hunkering down in
front of him as fathers do, he rested the little boy’s hands on his own
hands and arms and slowly backed away, allowing the child to support
himself on his father’s arms. Looking like a little mechanical toy, with
stiff legs as if he had no knees, he put one foot in front of another,
grinning and gurgling as he staggered along. And when he stumbled and
grazed his knee it was God that soothed and healed it (11:3). It was all
so long ago. The little boy was too young to appreciate how dependent
he was on his ever-present and attentive father but that didn’t matter
because the joy of loving parents in their tiny girls and boys that
toddle all over the place needs no special mention in those days. And so
it was with the Holy Father, so these verses tell us. They spoke of
days when all was warmth and affection and pleasure but now, as Hosea
writes, Israel has grown old and suffers from senility and premature
ageing (7:9) and God is pictured as a father pacing up and down the room
anguishing over how to help him. (Compare 4:17 and 11:8, for example.)
The very reading of such texts makes it clear that to reduce the
Story of the Bible to legal categories with an unhealthy stress on
juridical words like "justification" is a crime. In light of truths told
as Hosea tells them, to reduce the Bible to a book of wise maxims or a
generalized moral code to which we must respond is tragic! It is more
than a riveting romance, more than a Story of holy love reaching out but if it is more it certainly isn’t less!
I know the anthropomorphisms of scripture mustn't be taken too far!
Of course! And isn’t it Hosea that reminds us that God is not a man
(11:9)! So, okay, we’re not to take them too far but we’re not to forget
that God wasn’t ashamed to liken himself to all that is best in fathers
and mothers and that finally (praise his name!) he wasn’t even ashamed
to become one of us.
The special relationship Israel had with God he was given in trust.
It was for the world that Israel was called and it is for the world that
the NT church is called. When we read the description of the churches
in the NT we sometimes wince and wonder and as we look around at them
today we sometimes wince and wonder even more. Does that
not make sense?Yes it does, but we still need to remember passages like
this in Hosea. There's something just not right about one of God's
people acting or speaking as if he/she isn't a part of the the "family"
and there's something risky about ceaselessly scorning God's children
when the Holy One who knows them best says he loves them.